We all work in the internet security industry, and as such we're involved with a wide range of technologies, markets and people. Our collective blog is a space for our insights, observations and interests...

(N.B. The opinions expressed here are those of the individual authors, and not those of Smoothwall ltd or Smoothwall inc.)

Thursday, May 28, 2015

"Hide My Ass" Comes Out of Hiding

The Internet has a chequered history with the humble ass. Kim Kardashian attempted to “break the Internet” with hers, and now we see VPN service “Hide My Ass” sold for£40 million to AVG.
This subscription driven VPN service is an interesting case study. Many VPN services are surprisingly coy about where they get their revenue, and about why they exist. HMA, on the other hand, are pretty up front: It was started as a way to bypass school filters, and it is subscription based.
It’s nice to see the articles finally showing what we’ve long known - these services are, in the main, used for bypassing school or workplace filtering, and not only by oppressed revolutionaries in a far off land. Nor is Hide My Ass a way to avoid the long arm of the law, they have, in the past, given up users’ browsing details under court orders.
What of other VPN providers - the “free” ones? Even subscription supported HMA admit freely they use affiliate marketing schemes to help keep the cost of plans down - what are the others doing to support the cost of bandwidth? Selling data, perhaps? For those with client software, they could be inspecting your secure connections! There’s even been cases where proxy/VPN software has inserted malware.
Our advice - block ‘em all - and think twice if you are a user attempting to connect to a VPN service. Despite the name, and the youth of its creator, HMA is a pretty grown-up VPN system - the others, well - who knows?